Jan V. White

Over his forty-year design career, Jan V. White wrote twelve books on grids, page layout, typography, designing charts and graphs, the use of color, and other aspects of information design. Now, eight of his classic design books can be yours, free.

Xerox Publishing Standards was perhaps the first modern style guide, covering everything from tone and voice to page layout and printing. Jan V. White worked on this book for years with Paul Doebler, editor, and innumerable Xerox staff. (Provided courtesy of Xerox Corporation.)

“Editing by Design, 3rd edition is a compendium of everything… I thought (and still believe) is worthwhile for people to find out about [design]… reworked and re-illustrated… it is a collection of single, though interrelated, units of advice. Each was culled from some place else in my old books, pamphlets, handouts from lectures, notes, and some even inside my skull. If the investor in EbyD3 has the patience to dig inside there, they can find all the info in organized fashion and as concise as I know how to word it…”

“The most popular and beloved of all of Jan’s books is the Graphic Idea Notebook, a collection of more than 2,000 illustrations and line art that visualize the abstract problems that page editors encounter. The images are arranged in five groups that reflect the key concepts of design: mime (body language, pointing, showing, displaying), time, place, type, and idioms. …it’s a still groundbreaking book, almost 30 years after its release.”

The Internet Archive automatically produces ones, but they’re not ideal, so we haven’t linked to them here. Design books should be examples of good design, so we’d like to make the electronic versions into the best possible examples of modern, digital books.

We also hope these first eight works, having been dedicated to the public domain, will live on in new web sites and in new formats, and go on to serve as the foundation for new design books, new design classes, and even uses we can’t imagine right now.

If you’d like to know when ePub, Kindle, iBooks or HTML versions come out, or when other interesting things happen around these books, with this site, or with Jan V. White, we’d love to let you know via an occasional email. (We will never use it for anything else.)

If you are a designer, a student, a teacher, a professor, an editor, a publisher, an ebook developer, or are otherwise interested in redistributing, rewriting or remixing these first eight of Jan V. White’s works, we’d especially like it if you signed up for a separate list just for those putting in the effort, so we can tell related projects about each other and reduce any duplication of labor.

This collection of Jan V. White’s life and work could not have been possible without the contributions of many kind, patient individuals. Thank you, all, and thank you, dear reader, for your attention.